From your lspci, the firewire controller isn't listed there either. Is there any other card you know works that you can try in, say, slot 1 with slot 2-5 empty? Is the winmodem a pci card? Does it actually work, or just detect? It could be that the whole pci part of the board is dead. Might be a blown cap.

The noacpi thing wouldn't matter. I made the suggestion on a hunch, before I found out that mb does not use the via bridge for audio, unlike mine...

Although I'm not certain this was the probem, it seems to be simply a matter of removing "noacpi" from my boot options. I'd made some changes to the bios, reset the bios, and made a couple more changes, so I can't be 100% positive. In any case, I now have audio using my pci soundblaster.

I was hesitant to upgrade the bios because the upgrade path is apparently very dependent on the current bios version, and I couldn't find the version number for mine.

Thanks to all for taking the time to help.

EDIT: there seems to be some serious jumping now, both with audio and video files....I'll have to look into it again later.